Collusion Among Health Sector Personnel Placement Agencies: AMP Conclusions & Legal Disputes

2024-01-21 10:29:35

Three private personnel placement agencies in the health sector participated in a collusion scheme as part of a mammoth call for tenders awarded by the Legault government last year, estimates the Public Procurement Authority (AMP ).

Updated yesterday at 5:00 a.m.

What there is to know

After a call for tenders, Quebec awarded a major contract last spring to private personnel placement agencies in the health sector.

Some agencies were targeted in June with allegations of “major irregularities” in the call for tenders.

After examination, the Public Procurement Authority maintains that three agencies colluded, according to a document that The Press obtained.

The watchdog for public contracts in Quebec presents its conclusions in a document that it sent to the owner of one of the three agencies, Elliot Kasser, to inform him that his company Confort Élite Laval, “does not meet the requirements of integrity” provided for in the Law on contracts of public bodies. The AMP advises it that it “might revoke its authorization” to contract with a public body, we can read in this document dated October 24 and signed by the director of business integrity, Louis X. Lavoie.

The AMP concludes that during the call for tenders, the three companies “participated in a collusion scheme intended to submit strategically defined prices and take advantage of the use of the resources of certain companies by ‘intermediary of another, lower bidder’.

Still according to this “notice of revocation” that The Press obtained, the AMP explains that it began at the end of May “an integrity examination in order to validate allegations of collusion with regard to” Mr. Kasser’s company and “two other bidders, i.e. 24 /7 Health Care Expertise and 9159-2634”.

The Press revealed in June that these companies were targeted by allegations of “major irregularities” regarding the imposing call for tenders from the Government Acquisition Center which was awarded to agencies to fill labor needs works in the health network (see capsule).

The AMP’s conclusions have not been tested by the courts.

The owners of 24/7 Health Care Expertise, Dany Côté, and 9159-2634 Québec inc., Jill Eusanio, vigorously deny having engaged in collusion. “We have provided all the answers to the questions asked to us by the authorities and we will do so once more before the Superior Court, since the same allegations were also presented before this court,” declared the management of 24/7 Expertise in health care in an email sent to The Press.

“We have always acted in accordance with the law and we regret that these unfounded allegations cast a shadow over the professionalism and dedication of our employees,” the statement added.

“Submission sacrifice”

The AMP document reveals that at the time of the call for tenders, Mr. Kasser was in negotiations with Dany Côté to sell his agency to Groupe Santé Halsa, a holding company administered by Dany Côté and Jill Eusanio which oversees 24/ 7 Expertise in health care and 9159-2634 Québec inc.

Mr. Kasser claims that it was not he who decided the prices at which his own company bid in the government’s call for tenders, but rather Dany Côté, who filled out the bid with the codes of Mr. Kasser’s access to the government’s electronic system in the name of Confort Élite Laval.

Dany Côté would have explained the strategy as follows to Mr. Kasser: “You are low, you will be the “sacrifice bet”, I’m going to go higher and Jill [Eusanio, propriétaire de 9159-2634 Québec inc.] will be in the middle,” summarizes the AMP in its letter.

Concretely, as part of the call for tenders, each participating agency had to bid at an hourly rate for different job categories. The agency that bid the lowest hourly rate got the first rank in the government’s bidding list, and more expensive agencies got the next ranks. Any company that demanded an hourly rate of more than double the cheapest company was automatically excluded from the market, according to the specific rules of this call for tenders. Jill Eusanio had indicated to The Pressin June, that several of the agencies that obtain a place in the market then “rent” employees among themselves and share the income when they do not have the resources to meet needs.

“Dany, tell me what [Confort Élite Laval] was essentially going to be a sacrifice bid which was going to set the ceiling price and that all bidders who presented prices beyond this price [plafond] will be excluded from the call for tenders,” wrote Mr. Kasser in a sworn declaration that he filed in Superior Court, as part of a civil suit brought by competing agencies who are trying to have “removed from the tender list » the three companies they accuse of collusion. In this statement, Mr. Kasser comes to the table and admits collusion.

Jill Eusanio strongly denies this version of the facts, which she describes as “ridiculous”. “Elliot Kasser had never made a call for tenders. As it is a very complicated process, Dany assisted him, in the presence of Elliot. The two submitted the call for tenders, but Dany did not know the prices [d’Elliot Kasser]any more than he knew the prices of my own company,” assures Ms. Eusanio.

According to her, the competing employment agencies who filed an action in Superior Court to remove the three companies from the award “paid Elliot to produce this affidavit”.

“It is clear that he had an advantage from the plaintiffs to make this statement under oath,” she adds.

24/7 Health Care Expertise affirms for its part that “the Court will be able to assess the declarations of Mr. Kasser who acknowledges under oath having been informed of his responsibility to choose and submit the prices corresponding to his bid. »

Reached by email, Mr. Kasser declined to comment on the matter.

Example of rate submitted

Agence 9272 Québec inc. (Comfort Élite Laval)

• Property of Elliot Kasser
• Hourly rate submitted for a nurse: $69.75*

Agence 9159 Québec inc.

• Property of Jill Eusanio
• Hourly rate submitted for a nurse: $114.75*

Agence 24/7

• Property of Dany Côté
• Hourly rate submitted for a nurse: $138.47*

* Example taken from a comparison compiled by the Public Procurement Authority to demonstrate that the three agencies “presented prices which follow strategic differences”. According to the rules of the call for tenders, all agencies that submitted a price twice as high as the lowest bidder were excluded. The 9272 Québec inc. agency was the lowest bidder. The price submitted by the 24/7 Healthcare agency is “double that of the 9272 Québec inc agency.” minus $1.53”, so just under the ceiling. The 9159 Quebec inc. agency “is positioned at a median price”.

In the front row, with only one nurse

At the end of the call for tenders, Mr. Kasser’s company was positioned “in 1st place among service providers in Quebec for jobs related to nursing care”, underlines the letter from the AMP, which concludes that the Prices of the three companies “follow strategic gaps” for different types of employment.

Several health establishments therefore began to contact Mr. Kasser’s agency to hire its nursing staff.

The businessman then showed himself to be “very concerned”, because in fact he only had one nurse within his agency, compared to 350 beneficiary attendants.

“Dany knows full well that I don’t have the resources to take execution requests and he responds to me, in English.”we got this” [“on s’en occupe”] “, affirms Mr. Kasser in his sworn declaration.

According to Ms. Eusanio, however, nothing in the rules of the call for tenders required participants to have at their disposal all the necessary personnel to respond to demand. “I bid on certain places to expand. We have the right to do that. Elliot absolutely wanted to aggressively enter the nursing field and expand,” she adds.

Deleting emails

Subsequently, relations between Elliot Kasser, Dany Côté and Jill Eusanio began to be more tense, the documents indicate.

June 8, 2023, the same day when The Press published an article reporting “major irregularities” in the call for tenders, “Elliot Kasser confirms that Dany Côté is calling him and asking him to delete all emails exchanged between them, a request reiterated by Jill Eusanio on the occasion of a meeting on June 20, 2023,” reads the letter from the AMP.

Jill Eusanio denies this version of the facts. She maintains that Elliot Kasser was “in a panic” because he had received nearly 1,000 emails from health establishments asking him to provide nurses that he did not have.

“Our policy is to always respond to emails. We told him that he might simply delete these request emails, that we were just not going to respond to them,” she says.

Ms. Eusanio, who is a lawyer, assures that she would never have asked anyone to “delete emails or evidence”. “It’s insulting! », she reacts.

Contracts still in force

The three agencies concerned continue to benefit from public contracts and therefore provide manpower to the health network. To date, the AMP has not included any of the agencies in its blacklist, that is to say the Register of companies ineligible for public contracts. It grants a minimum of 10 days to any company subject to a notice of revocation to present its observations in writing or provide other documents.

” In the case [de ce] file, it is always analyzed by the AMP, while respecting the principles of procedural fairness to which the AMP is subject as a surveillance body. Considering the ongoing analysis, the AMP must preserve the confidentiality of the file,” said its communications advisor, Stéphane Hawey. He did not want to specify whether Confort Élite and 24/7 Healthcare also received notice of revocation. And he refused to comment on the AMP’s conclusions contained in the October 24 document.

One of the plaintiffs in the dispute before the Superior Court, the owner of the Progressive Services Placements en santé santé agency, Patrice Lapointe, believes that Elliot Kasser’s sworn declaration “undoubtedly confirms” the suspicions that he had.

“We have an admission from a person who acted directly as a collusor […] to circumvent tender rules. And it’s supported by a lot of documentation,” he says.

Who is going to incriminate themselves via testimony for something they didn’t do? The other people who benefit from the fruits of these actions are sure to deny it, and we are therefore not surprised that they deny it.

Patrice Lapointe, owner of the Progressive Services agency Healthcare Placements

According to him, it is “totally false” to claim that the plaintiffs “bought” Mr. Kasser’s testimony.

The civil suit also targets the Government Acquisition Center which Mr. Lapointe accuses of laxity in the supervision of its call for tenders. He recalls that the minister responsible for Public Contracts Law is the former prosecutor of the Charbonneau commission, Sonia LeBel, president of the Treasury Board.

“The government, by not acting on this, even if it knows these things, it is behaving in a certain way to condone them, and that is what we deplore,” he says. -he.

Patrice Lapointe wants the AMP to take “concrete actions” once morest the agencies it targets in its notice of October 24. “Because the passage of time allows these companies, with the government’s tolerance nothing more and nothing less, to benefit from the fruit of what they have done,” he says.

Patrice Lapointe is also president of the largest association of private placement agencies in the health sector, Private Companies of Nursing Personnel of Quebec (EPPSQ). This association dismissed two of its directors last year, including Dany Côté, on the basis of allegations of collusion targeting them.

According to Mr. Lapointe, the government should better supervise the agencies instead of eliminating the use of their services by the end of 2026.

A mammoth call for tenders

Launched on December 19, 2022 and awarded last spring to approximately 100 agencies, the Government Acquisition Center’s call for tenders is unprecedented in scope. It aims to meet needs estimated at more than eight million hours of work per year in the health network, particularly for nurses and beneficiary attendants. This is the equivalent of more than 4,500 full-time workers over a full year. This contract is currently being executed and is renewable every six months, until spring 2025. Another call for tenders was recently launched by the Government Acquisition Center in order to possibly take over, until the end of the use of agencies in the health network between the end of this year and the end of 2026 depending on the region. It was suspended recently due to new complaints from agencies regarding its conditions.

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